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Katie Fraser's blog and website

I'm an academic librarian, working in the UK Higher Educational sector, supporting academics and students. Prior to this, I was a researcher, working with social and learning technologies.

My interests include the application of all kinds of technology, research support in libraries, learning spaces (my Librarianship dissertation studied an Information Commons project), evidence-based practice and the professional development of library and information workers.

You can find out more about more about me from the links to the left. Note that the views expressed on this website/blog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other individual or organisation.

August 2nd, 2010

The view of my desk at work

As I was only in for two days this week a major goal for today was clearing my inbox as far as possible! I tend to have folder for projects so this isn’t too alarming a task, but I had a few queries to follow up and things to get done before I went.

Firstly, I followed up on the map query from yesterday by establishing contact with the map library. They were very helpful. Unfortunately, copyright restrictions meant the maps couldn’t be copied without permission from the publisher, but they did fax me through the details of the series of maps I needed. Once I had the publisher’s name I was able to source quite a few alternative points of access: one local stockist of a CD with the maps on, and also online versions of the maps (which were useable with help from Google Translate!)

My original plan was to be in work on Monday and Wednesday this week, so I didn’t think I would be in today, and only belatedly remembered I’d said I was unable to help with some teaching on Tuesday morning. The teaching was unique to this time of year: helping tutors who were going to be supporting international students in researching essays for our summertime international induction courses. I was able to pop in to the session and help support one of our biological science librarians in demonstrating some general science resources which might be relevant for students to search.

I made my way through the majority of the emails I had – mostly small things – as the day progressed. This included providing some text for a distance learning handbook for Geography with details of library services. I was able to borrow a large part of the text from another of our librarians who has a much larger portfolio of distance learning students in the departments she supports. However, I needed to check a lot of the details of services provided, including where a graduate certificate fitted in our various borrowing and service categories!

Lastly, I was down to two messages in the inbox, and had to finish sending off the details of our subscriptions to individual academic journal titles to one of the departments I support. I’ve been trying to find time within a staff meeting to discuss these within departments, but as this department doesn’t have a staff meeting scheduled until after our deadline for decisions, we decided to email the list of current subscriptions round, like previous years. As I send the email, I’m thinking there must be a better method than inviting email comments, perhaps some kind of online questionnaire? I make a note to investigate this further with the other departments when I came back from my break, and then my library day in the life week for Summer 2010 is over!